>What I was picking up on in your comments about space
>is a very different topic though, and are you not
>side-stepping a simple criticism and missing something
>in your smoke screen.
>

and i believe you are confusing space with place.

what follows is pure real-estate, exploiting a surface, landscape, even if
it is multi-storied, it is not exploiting or having to do with any of the
spaces i have been talking about.
we are linked at the moment on this list by a metaphorical space we all
agree exists, cyberspace.
what you describe is surface not space.

>Here in Sydney, 'space invader urban consolidisation'
>is a very fascinating economic and social phenomena,
>certainly a class warfare exists in the zone/s of
>gentrification in an area like Kings Cross for
>example. This really the same model the land surveyor
>intiated in the colonial expansion in 18th/19th/20thc
>throughout aboriginal Australia and the rest of the
>Pacific. It is based on land useage and its value.
>Simply a culture of economic values.


this next bit sounds to me like urban romanticising.
let's not forget the ugliness of american soldiers on rest and recreation
during the vietnam invasion.
let us not forget that kings-x is synonymous with prostitution and drugs,
violence, police corruption and human degradation.

>The Cross has
>been for a long while a cultural melting pot, where
>itinerants, the displaced and homeless, the visitant,
>the immigrant, the tourist, the artistic flotsam and
>jetsam and the enigmatic Australian Broadcasting
>Commission(TV<Radio and the orchestras) was welded
>together with the high rollers and the apartments of
>the establishment. But this is all changing now. OK,
>the space merchants as they are called, invade every
>inch, rationally. Many of these young yuppy
>individuals are not locals but highly paid globalists
>with a very set formula. Govermentally, there can
>never be any apologies for these sorts of profiteers,
>only compliance and due process.

you are suggesting it would be better if they were good australian profiteers?



>Space is the cancer
>of modernism, all consuming, never sated, and always
>needing more terrain.

space is not tied to terrain, but place definitely is.

>This consumptive tendency of
>consolidation is as much a physical thing as it is
>philosophical and it is a poltics of excess. Certainly
>poetry like painting struggles high and low to come to
>any relevant relationship this age of the consolidated
>spectacle, media is the poetry and visual art of the
>consumer.



>Perhpas the magnificents of the Olympic
>Opening ceremony was adored because it was good ole
>analogue pantomine. It was a theatre of cultural iseas
>rather than a spectacle in the corporate design. That
>attempt to represent the poetic essence of place was
>generated by artists who worked with a sympathetic
>political apparatus. It would have been very different
>had it been run by the Conservatives.

perhaps the technology was transparent?
the only thing analog were the people.
how did you watch it, on tv?
you mean the olympics was run by progressives(opposite to conservative)?



>
>Is not the cyber attitude not disimiliar or the same,
>or part of this gross invasiveness of the economic
>factor. I am suspicious of space talk, it is an
>imperialism, disloyal to anything other than progress
>and the consumption of everything in its way.

sure cyberspace is something to fear.
but lets face it, these profiteers you speak of, (before the berlin wall we
may have called them capitalists), have not much more real estate left to
exploit on earth.
and human beings don't have all that much physical place left to occupy.
the quest for colonisation of outer space(a physical space-still landscape
we are talking about here) seems to have diminished as an option.
sure there are real estate agents of cyberspace wanting to draw up
boundaries and sub-divide the whole dam thing, bill gates comes to mind and
george soros, and profiteers wishing to cash in on it, something like the
occupation of australia from 26 january, 1788, onwards, people we revere as
pioneers, and who figure so much in our 'imposed' history.
yet there are spaces in cyberspace where artists are doing great, beautiful
and different things.
it is being recognised more as a sensory space than a physical space.
cyberfeminists applaud it as a space where women, always already virtual
occupying spaces in and around a male landscape, are more comfortable and
more able to envisage its possibilities.


paul de mann said the greatest resistance to theory is resistence itself.
are you expressing technophobia because you don't know enough about it?





>I have
>seen that Aboriginal people are dispondent,
>depressed deprived because they have been small
>players in the economics of colonialism. There's is an
>economic model of deprivation. White Australia, such
>as your good selves know it in philosophical terms,
>you struggle with in poetic terms, ultimately in the
>melting pot you mmay join the political struggle. It
>is politics of language I feel, not of definitions or
>complexiity as everything is and basically simple,
>actual and virtual.

here is where you must start to see things differently.
try deleuze's take on virtual, actual, possible and real.


virtual is not 'not real' or not 'not there'.
virtual is a process, a problematic, which can never be achieved.

virtual poetry asks the question of how do we communicate observations,
emotions, the world, in language.
there are many actualisations of this virtual problem, the actualisation is
a thought out solution to the virtual but causing new questions to be
asked, poetry is an actualistion, poems being the real product, and the
un-composed poems being possible but as yet not being real(the potential to
be real).

>
>I also worry that your concept of an Australian
>landscape absent of its indigenous people is
>mystification.

i don't conceive of an australian landscape absent of its indigenous
people, no more than i conceive of an australian landcsape absent of me or
you.
what i said was the aboriginal people exist not only in the landscape but
also in a space which can't be colonised.

i existed in that "other" space for much of the time that i was kevin.
much of my early poetry came from that space.


>
>You don't want to maintain the gate-keepers posture,
>it is a numbing ineffective impotant state of body and
>mind, there is enormous need for radicality in the
>culture of politics at this point of time. It is
>called radical transmission. The young are organising
>actaul resistances to Glabal economic expansion the
>cultural concepts of S11 in Melbourne are about
>defining regional environmental and cultural issues
>and 'advertising' employing the few resorces that is
>legally allowed to them. I like that, for they express
>complexity using abstract strategies they exploit from
>the space in-between. I think that is where Henri
>Michaux was in residence too most of the time.
>

i am not familiar with michaux's work.
but i agree that politically active people should not fear technology, but
embrace it, understand it and actively participate in its operation.

>(You know Professor Elkin in his forward in Karel
>Kupka's "Dawn of Art" of 1965, said that, "The absense
>of gardens, houses, and villages had led many
>observers to underestimate the ability and even
>humanity of the Australian Aborigines". And that was
>was just two years before The Commonwealth Govement of
>Australia gave citizen rights to Aboriginal people. Of
>course Andre Breton in the same livre says, "Should
>the untutored eye, by which I mean the eye uninformed
>about what is to confront it, the eye uninfluenced by
>the Occidental "way of see" that for centuries has
>been the conditioning influence, be allowed to wander
>over these bark paintings brought from far-off Arnhem
>Land, it will find its reward first and foremost in
>their exemplary harmony".

i would have thought that looking at an aboriginal bark painting from
arnhem land, in a place other than arnhem land, most odd and that might be
what i call mystification.


>
>Komninos you said, "despite all attempts of genicide
>and clearing of the aboriginal people from the land,
>there are still other spaces where they exist, which
>are not
>physical, which will never be able to be conquered,
>surveyed, sub-divided."

and i hope this statement is clearer to you now.


>
>Its an interesting observation and comparing it say,
>with the miniscule written accounts of the clearing of
>Jewish Warsaw, memory is a quite magical conduit. But
>the cemony goes on....and Aboriginal presence is alive
>and well, and place/space occupation in much of the
>continent is a reality, as is the languages, and
>painting, legal challenges, it all exists and is in a
>state of flux and constantly changes and adjusts to
>the challenges of the future. Noel Pearson is
>encouraging by asking all people to take an optimistic
>outlook to build up the culture and people and
>self-esteem. So today I expect that the families;
>Rontji, the Entata, the Moketarinja, the Inkamala, the
>Pareroultja the Landara and Namatjiras are hopefully
>having a good time out at Hermansburg, and in
>Milingimbi those family clans like Djambarbuingu and
>Rirajino, Gubabuingu and Liagalawumiri, are having
>time-out for a long-weekend and a Bar-B-Que on
>Australia Day, and I wish them a good time at it.


you wish them a good time celebrating their occupation?
and the loss of their cultural rights?

>There there man!
>
>and as you say, this is just my opinion
>
>cheers
>Ruark Lewis
>
>
>_____________________________________________________________________________
>http://cars.yahoo.com.au/ - Yahoo! Cars
>- Buy, sell or finance a car..
>

all opinions expressed here, in my opinion, are the expressed opinions of
komninos.
komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502
cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/
komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 5552 8872
lecturer in cyberStudies,
school of arts,
gold coast campus,
griffith university,
pmb 50, gold coast mail centre
queensland, 9726
australia.